Imposter Syndrome, ADHD-Style: You’re Not an Imposter — You’re Overqualified for Normal

Imposter syndrome tells you that you don’t belong. I think it has the diagnosis backwards.

For a long time, I’d leave a meeting where my contributions had been received positively and enthusiastically and be certain that I was faking it, and I was terrified that someone was going to figure that out. No matter how much positive feedback I got, that little voice insisted I’d snuck in through a side door, and it was only a matter of time before someone realized I wasn’t supposed to be in the room.

It took me a while to notice what that voice was actually measuring me against.

It wasn’t measuring my results. It was measuring my struggles. I was in a constant state of worry that I was going to miss something important or say something wrong or act out of place, while everyone else seemed to do it so easily. Steady, linear, casual. No white-knuckle sprints of last-minute panic, no sleepless nights the day before. I felt like I was only succeeding because people didn’t see the mess, and I was judging myself by my struggles.

Here’s the reframe that finally made that voice quieter: I wasn’t getting away with cheating, I was grading myself on the wrong test.

My whole life felt like I was getting a report card for a class I didn’t know I was taking. The grades looked bad, and I carried that around like it meant something about me. But the problem wasn’t me, or my grade. The problem was that I was being measured by how well I looked normal. I wasn’t normal. I was doing something harder the whole time: pattern-matching, hyperfocusing, failing, recovering, and showing up anyway. No one saw how much it took out of me just to try, and, for a long time, I didn’t realize it either.

Thanks to decades of field experience, I got pretty good at it.

So when the imposter voice tells you that you aren’t good enough, try asking it a better question. Not “Am I good enough to be here?” but “Whose test am I taking?” Because most of the time, the test was never built with your brain in mind. You didn’t fail at being normal. You are over-qualified for it, and nobody handed you the right test.

You’re not behind. You’re not faking it. You’ve been doing senior-level work for a job nobody bothered to define.

If you’ve ever felt this way, I’d love to hear it in the comments below. What’s a wrong “test” you’ve graded yourself on?